Valentine to the Gods

Music is healing. I know this to be true. When I feel bad the right piece of music can ease my pain and discomfort, give me space to to unravel my illness and heal it. Right now it feels like all the little green guys from the Mucinex commercial have invaded my throat. My body aches. I slept badly. Just one of those days where you want to crawl in bed with some Benadryl and start over tomorrow.

Oh but time waits for no woman, even if she’s fixing her hair. So up I am trying to sort through e-mails, check articles and all the completely unexciting things I must do every day. So I needed some support. I reached out for Meg Hutchinson’s I’d Like To Know. Something my soul craved this song. In between all my sniffling and coughing I think I figured out why.

While the song is a love song, it speaks to my relationship with my Gods and with my religion. It’s a song about being a seeker, needing more sustenance and more subtlety. It’s about the depth and breadth and grounded earthiness, about that silent sacredness that lives in the deep forest, the jagged mountain, wild prairie and deserted beach. I think the key thing that people of other faiths misunderstand about Paganism is how deeply rooted and engaging it is. People write about the fad of Wicca and “Neo-Paganism” but they have trouble understanding why this fad has outlasted Chico and the Man, Swatches, the Spice Girls and Napster.

I’ll be writing more about the reason Pagans find their paths deeply engaging and desirable, but I want to talk about the concept of desire and religion right now. The song above is a love song, and in all religions the theme or spiritual love often takes on the characteristics and language of romantic love.

Let thought become the beautiful Woman.

Cultivate your mind and heart to that depth

That it can give you everything
A warm body can.

Why just keep making love with God’s child– Form

When the Friend Himself is standing
Before us
So open-armed?

My dear,
Let prayer become your beautiful Lover

And become free,
Become free of this whole world
Like Hafiz.

–Hafiz, Sufi mystic

From the seductive Song of Solomon and the passionate theology of Julian of Norwich down to modern Christian worship music: we see all that which is Divine as one of the most intimate relationship of our lives, close as a lover.

Pagans certainly have this perspective in their religions as well. What makes our version of all that which is Divine as beloved is that instead of focusing all that religious emotion upon a single point we share it among a web of connections. Even where Pagans are engaged in monastic or have an extremely strong relationship with a single God, most of us aren’t “exclusive” in our God-relationships. I admit at times my relationship with Hephaistos does sometimes manifest this perspective of him as the Divine Beloved, but so do my relationships with Manannan and the Horned One, as well as my relationships with Goddesses.

I think that our polytheism is why the idea of the Divine Beloved hasn’t ever really caught the fever pitch that is has in other religions. Our spiritual lives resemble polyamory (which is generally an accepted lifestyle for Pagans) and has much of the same emphasis on communication, balance and respect. It isn’t right for me to neglect one of my Gods for the other, they all deserve my time, love and devotion and for me to place one of them in the position of being my “all and everything” simply wouldn’t fly. Just as it’s unhealthy for me to expect another human being to fulfill all my needs and desires it’s also, in my opinion, unhealthy for me to expect one God to “complete me”.

Yet, like polyamory, this doesn’t mean my relationships with my Gods are shallow. They are deeply satisfying, challenging and rewarding relationships. They have all the more depth and breadth because they are different relationships, which are interconnected in surprising and intricate ways. They are all beloved and deserve roses and Valentines and chocolates.

I can’t think of a better Valentine than Emerald Rose’s Urania Sings:

P.S. I may start describing myself as “spiritually bisexual and religiously polyamorous”. Heh.